Basic Torah facts

Unlike 99% of all non-clerical Jews, I read the Torah (first 5 books of the Bibole, sacred to Jews) in its most authoritative translation.

The first thing to note, once you get past the notions that God or Moses wrote it, is that research into the text shows that it is the product of four authors, whose documents were edited together. This "documentary hypothesis" is as well-established as evolution, but many religious believers reject it. But that's why there are so many duplications -- sloppy editing. Deuteronomy was probably the work of one person.

Second, it's really primitive. Jews who make this document the center of their lives are fixated on the distant past. Successive waves of liberal Judaism have attempted to spin or whitewash the Torah, but it remains a document where women have no rights, slavery is acceptable, God urges the Israelites to commit ethnic cleansing, and much more gruesome stuff.

Third, NONE of it happened! The story -- exodus, Sinai, promised land -- is central to Judaism, but there's no evidence for any of it. There is no record of the Jews in Egypt, as slaves or in any other capaciity.

Atheists should know what's in the Bible and how the various parts got included. So when Christians get that beatific smile and talk about it being the word of God, you can give them a few kernels of truth about this document (about which they are largely ignorant, so it won't be hard to know more than they do).

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When i was young lad in catholic grade school, i believe they told us that the Torah was written by Moses himself!! As the years went by and I read more history, i no longer believed in that bit of mythology.It appears to be a fact that there is nothing outside of the Torah/Olde Testament that independently confirms the existence of Moses or any of those characters. The entire field of biblical archaeology , supported by the devout, has been a fruitless attempt to shore up the scriptures.